Lynch: OPM hack could out secret agents | RUSSIAN MILITARY PLANE CRASHES IN SUMMER 2015: Alarming rise in Russian military plane accidents Wednesday July 29th, 2015 at 1:33 PM
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RUSSIAN MILITARY PLANE CRASHES IN SUMMER 2015
RUSSIAN MILITARY PLANE CRASHES IN SUMMER 2015
MiG-29
June 4, Astrakhan Region. The plane crashed during a training flight, due to failure of equipment.
Su-34
June 4, Voronezh Region. While landing, the airplane skidded off the runway and overturned because of a dormant braking parachute.
Tu-95 MS
June 8, Amur Region. Just ahead of takeoff, the plane caught fire and skidded off the runway. The fire originated from one of the engines.
MiG-29
July 3, Krasnodar Region. During the flight the engine caught fire, due to a technical fault. The fire spread to the black box. The pilot managed to safely eject.
Su-24M
July 6, Khabarovsk Territory. While taking off, the engine failed. The aircraft fell sharply and crashed into the ground.
Tu-95 MS
July 14, Khabarovsk Territory. During the flight, three of the four engines failed. The crew parachuted safely.
AN-12
July 17, Chelyabinsk Region. During the flight, an alarm about the failure of two engines went off. The plane made an emergency landing and skidded off the runway.
Timeline by RBTH
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin expressed concern over a series of Russian Air Force plane crashes this summer. He called on the government to investigate the causes of the sudden spate of accidents. “We need some kind of solution,” he said, adding that there were too many accidents. “I think the problems may lie in the operation of equipment.”
RBTH tried to figure out the cause of these frequent air crashes. Experts remain divided in their opinion.
RBTH tried to figure out the cause of these frequent air crashes. Experts remain divided in their opinion.
Version 1: Old equipment
Experts often wonder about the age of a plane that crashed. It is no secret that Russia continues to operate equipment left over from the Soviet Union. Machines that are in use now were made in the 1970s.
The only relatively new plane that was involved in a recent accident is the Su-34, which has been produced since 2006. The MiG-29 came into production before the 1990s, the last Tu-95 was manufactured in 1992 and the Su-24M was built in 1993.
But age is not a critical factor in aviation. The condition of an aircraft depends exclusively on the quality of its maintenance and repair.
Version 2: Improper use and maintenance
Most flight accidents are caused on account of engine troubles. Russian company United Engine Corporation (UEC) is responsible for the manufacturing and repair of engines. UEC head Vladislav Maslov said that the Ministry of Defense has no claims against the company. He added that the amount of repair orders from the ministry is growing. “In 2015, we repaired six times more engines than in 2013,” Masalov said.
“For a long time, the Russian defense industry has been losing human resources and been deprived of government funding, so that does not aid performance,” Major-General Pavel Zolotarev, Deputy Director of the Institute of USA and Canada, said. He believes that counterfeit parts may be the cause of the accidents.
Version 3: The human factor
Alexander Garnaev, a renowned test pilot said, the problem is human error, and lack of proper technical training. “A system of compliance with standards of production and operation was destroyed in aviation and space technology,” he said.
Version 4: Coincidence
Many experts are inclined to see a simple coincidence in these accidents. "It's just random cases,” former Russian Air Force Commander Vladimir Andreev said. “It used to happen even more in the past.”
In the summer, the season of intensive aircraft operations begins in Russia, and the number of flights increases. With it, increases the likelihood of accidents, according to Colonel Igor Malikov, Deputy Chief of the Flight Test Centre.
Instructor pilot, Air Force Maj Andrew Krasnopyorov does not agree with Malikov. "In fact, this is nonsense,” he said. “Engines mainly fail in the winter, when the aircraft is filled with substandard fuel... The aircraft can safely fly to the airport on one engine with a reduction of 5 meters per second. It is not a problem.”
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Flickr/Axel J.Reports suggest United Airlines has been hacked.
The Chinese team believed to be responsible for a high-profile cyber strike on the US government has hacked United Airlines, according to reports.
Bloomberg reported the breach on Wednesday, citing a number of sources familiar with the situation.Business Insider has reached out to United Airlines for comment and confirmation.
The breach reportedly occurred “ in May or early June,” and compromised a variety of the Airline’s IT systems and, according to Bloomberg, means the hackers have “data on the movements of millions of Americans.”
The compromised information listed in the report also includes passengers' personal information.
Bloomberg’s sources report the hackers may have also stolen United’s forward-looking mergers and acquisitions strategy.
The attack has reportedly been linked to prior strikes on the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and health insurer Anthem.
The White House revealed the attack in June when it admitted hackers had breached the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), compromising the details of roughly 4 million staff.
The attack was initially believed to be the work of state-sponsored Chinese hackers. However, US President Barack Obama’s administration said it will not officially blame China for the OPM hack, or take action against it.
The Anthem attack happened in February and saw hackers successfully steal information on 78.8 million current and former customers and employees.
Business Insider has contacted the OPM and Anthem for comment on the reported links between the three attacks. Business Insider has also contacted the Washington and London Chinese embassies for comment.
The report follows warnings from the US government that China is collecting data on US business and government departments as part of a wider plan to develop infrastructure-killing cyber weapons.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) claimed China is developing attack tools that could knock a nation's infrastructure offline using data stolen during high-profile hacks in May.
The report follows efforts by United to improve its cyber security. United launched a bug bounty program in May in a bid to find holes in its security. Bug bounties pay hackers to responsibly and privately disclose bugs they find to the company.
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Ben Sasse 8:16 a.m. EDT July 28, 2015
Office of Personnel Management in Washington, D.C.(Photo: Shawn Thew, epa)
The White House refuses to publicly blame China for hacking the (OPM), for stealing the private information of over 21 million public servants and their families and closest friends, and for amassing one of the largest spying databases in history. This refusal is a strategic mistake, and the fact that we’re making it may indicate things are even worse than we’ve been led to believe.
By declining to tell the truth about China, we abandon a core tenet of cyber deterrence theory: public attribution. The administration knows this.
In April, the issued its new Cyber Strategy that explicitly states: “Attribution is a fundamental part of an effective cyber deterrence strategy as anonymity enables malicious cyber activity by state and non-state groups … Public and private attribution can play a significant role in dissuading cyber actors from conducting attacks in the first place.”
So why is the administration officially staying silent? Inside Washington, two rationales have been floated. But to the 21 million Americans who had their information stolen — many of whom work in our defense and intelligence communities — one of these rationales isn’t compelling and the other is downright disturbing.
The administration’s first — and flimsiest — justification for staying silent is that attributing the attacks to China could force us to reveal our own intelligence sources and methods. This is wrong. Telling the truth about China doesn’t disclose our own capabilities. We’re not taking China to court. We don’t have to publicly file the intelligence and analysis that informs our judgments.
Instead, we could do what we did with the North Korean hack of Sony Entertainment Pictures — we simply said we had our reasons for concluding was the culprit and that it wasn’t ambiguous. Some in the cyber community objected that they didn’t have all of the information; but, in the end, we identified the North Koreans and our sensitive information was not released.
The administration’s second, more concerning, justification for not publicly blaming the Chinese is that doing so could force the United States into taking some type of retributive action, sparking a rapid escalation between Washington and and possibly starting an online shooting war. If the OPM and other hacks have taught us anything, it’s that the United States would be exceedingly vulnerablein such a conflict. Our own national security leaders have made this clear.
Since 2013, the has identified the cyber threat as the number one strategic risk for the United States, more threatening than terrorist attacks or traditional wars. Cyber threats keep our defense and intelligence leaders up at night because no aspect of daily life is immune to attack, and the administration’s decision not to attribute the OPM hack to the Chinese suggests that we’re not operating from a position of strength.
Americans know security matters are sometimes handled in discreet ways out of the public view. Maybe the same bureaucrats who couldn’t identify the hack for more than a year are now planning an intricate and clandestine cyber response that will teach the Chinese a lesson and preclude a cyber standoff. Maybe, but there is reason to be skeptical.
Instead, many are concerned that Washington has neglected cyber security for so long that we now find ourselves in a dangerous position. We know what we need to do — aggressively deter cyber attacks — but we are unable to do so because we are too vulnerable to those very threats.
Something big has to change.
We need to do a serious scrub of our cyber threat assessments, of our defensive posture against online attacks, and of our offensive cyber doctrine. We can’t be passive anymore. We can’t sit in silence and naively hope that we’ll somehow still manage to preserve our national interests or our way of life.
Perhaps the administration has a different reason for not publicly blaming China for the OPM attack. If they did, it is in direct contradiction to their own cyber strategy. If they are silent out of duress, however, it underscores the essential point that we’ve got a lot more to worry about than just the loss of social security numbers and ruined credit scores. Our national security is at stake.
Sen. is a Republican from Nebraska.
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Attorney General Loretta Lynch says she has “grave concerns” that a foreign power could out undercover U.S. operatives using the data stolen in the recent hacks of the federal government.
“It certainly highlights the risk of cyber breaches in a very, very real, and a very, very life threatening way,” the head of the Justice Department said during an interview aired Monday on “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”
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It’s believed that China was behind the devastating data breach at the Office of Personnel Management, although the administration has declined to blame the Asian power publicly.
The digital intruders made off with sensitive data on over 22 million people.
“I’m one of those people,” Lynch said, “as is almost anyone who’s worked for government for the last 20 years.”
Most importantly from an intelligence perspective, the hackers compromised a security clearance database that housed exhaustive background investigation forms. Officials said 21.5 million people had their security clearance information taken.
That’s led to fears that Beijing could uncover intelligence officers that have been secretly stationed in China for years.
Although the CIA doesn't store data with OPM, it’s believed the vast troves of pilfered information could help Chinese officials connect the dots.
National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers addressed the concern during an interview last week at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
The stolen OPM data, he said, “gives you great insight potentially used for counterintelligence purposes.”
“If I’m interested in trying to identify U.S. persons who may be in my country, and I am trying to figure out why they are there. Are they just tourists? Are they there for some other alternative purpose? There are interesting insights from the data you take from OPM.”
Lynch acknowledged that the OPM intrusions are “a classic example of identity theft gone wild.”
Investigators, she said, are “dealing with the type of hack, trying to recognize it, trying to examine it, trying to see if it hasn’t been done before, using it to see what we can learn from it.”
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Russia's newest anti-NGO law, under which the National Endowment for Democracy on Tuesday was declared an "undesirable organization" prohibited from operating in Russia, is the latest evidence that the regime of President Vladimir Putin faces a worsening crisis of political legitimacy.
Putin may claim that the National Endowment for Democracy and other nongovernmental organizations are "a threat to Russia's basic constitutional order," and his labeling them as dangerous enemies, along with the Russian democrats he calls "national traitors," is his typical way of rallying political support by appealing to nationalist fears and hostilities.
But it is the regime itself that has been undermining Russia's constitutional order through repression, corruption and international aggression; and the pressures are now building toward what many in Russia believe is a major political turning point.
Putin rose to power in 1999 on a wave of anti-Chechen hysteria, but it was steady economic growth over the next decade fueled by rising oil prices that accounted for his popularity. Now that growth has come to a screeching halt, and the gross domestic product could decline by as much as 8 percent this year, according to economist Anders Aslund.
The economic crisis is beginning to be felt at the local level. Real wages fell by 9 percent in the first quarter of 2015, and social spending on health and pensions has been cut sharply, even as military spending has continued to increase. With Russia's foreign debt of $570 billion exceeding its $157 billion in liquid reserves by more than three times, Russia faces the danger of bankruptcy, especially with Western financial sanctions cutting off Russia's access to international funding.
The crisis's political repercussions could grow because of rampant elite corruption, which is essential to the functioning of Russia's system of power. An example was the corruption surrounding the Sochi Olympics that was the subject of an extensive report by Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader who was murdered in February just steps from the Kremlin.
According to Nemtsov, the majority of construction contracts were awarded to companies with ties to Putin, and all were dramatically inflated to several times the international average for similar projects. Karen Dawisha, a leading expert on elite corruption in Russia, estimates Putin's worth, conservatively, at $40 billion.
REUTERS/Sergei KarpukhinRussian S-400 Triumph medium-range and long-range surface-to-air missile systems drive during the Victory Day parade at Red Square in Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2015.
In addition to economic crisis and elite corruption, Russia's war in Ukraine is a third factor undermining the regime's political legitimacy. Even without meaningful assistance from the United States and Europe, the Ukrainians have fought the Russians to a standstill in eastern Ukraine, and this is a far cry from the decisive victory that Putin predicted when he annexed Crimea last year. Putin has tried to hide the casualties Russia has suffered in the conflict, knowing that the war does not enjoy widespread popular support. He also knows from Russia's experience in Afghanistan and other conflicts in Russian history that failure in war could threaten the regime's survival.
The regime's fear over its own lack of political legitimacy is apparent in the lengths to which it is going to prevent any electoral competition. Not only has Russia moved up the date of 2016 national parliamentary elections , making it more difficult for the opposition to challenge incumbent officeholders, but also it is cracking down on three regional parliamentary campaigns in which a coalition of democratic opposition parties are trying to win seats in elections to be held in September.
Thomson ReutersRussian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a meeting with senior officers who attained higher ranks at the Kremlin in Moscow
In Novosibirsk, three opposition activists are on a hunger strike protesting authorities' decision to exclude them from the ballot. In Kostroma, the opposition campaign manager is in jail and faces politically-motivated criminal charges.
These efforts to deny the opposition a chance to win a handful of seats in Russia's equivalent of a state legislature demonstrate that the regime sees any alternative to its own politics as a serious threat that must be eliminated.
This is the context in which Russia has passed the law prohibiting Russian democrats from getting any international assistance to promote freedom of expression, the rule of law and a democratic political system. Significantly, democrats have not backed down. They have not been deterred by the criminal penalties contained in the "foreign agents" law and other repressive laws.
They know that these laws contradict international law, which allows for such aid, and that the laws are meant to block a better future for Russia. They are not even frightened by the threat of being killed, which has already been the fate of Nemtsov and other Russian democrats.
The least the United States and other Western democracies can do is to continue to provide moral and political solidarity to such brave people. It serves not just their interests but our own as well.
Read the original article on The Washington Post. Copyright 2015. Follow The Washington Post onTwitter.
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